Understanding how land use and land cover change influences the flow and water quality of rivers is critically important for river management and restoration. Human activities have transformed the landscapes in southern China where damaged river systems need to be restored and better managed for achieving environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we quantified the land use and land cover pattern of the Dongjiang River watershed, China between 1990 and 2006 based on remote sensing data and field measurements.

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) contains crop and other specific land cover classifications obtained using remote sensing for the conterminous United States. This raster-formatted and geo-referenced product has been widely used in such applications as disaster assessments, land cover and land use research, agricultural sustainability studies, and agricultural production decision-making. The traditional CDL data distribution channels include paper thematic maps, email data requests, CD/DVD media, and ftp bulk downloading.

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most degraded and threatened globally. A need for systematic assessment of riverine habitats is thus well-documented. Riparian zones are especially important due to the large array of ecosystem and social services they can provide, while also recently gaining a major role in the new European biodiversity policy. In this context, the necessity to gather spatial information on extent, distribution and characteristics of the riparian zones is clear.

Mapping urban expansion and impervious surfaces (IS) has become a useful tool for supporting watershed assessments. The lack of large-area time-series maps created the need to develop an approach and products that can easily be scaled. In this research application, 81 Landsat 1, 2, and 5 scenes for the epochs of 1975, 1985, and 1996 were used to map urban land use/land cover across New England, USA.

Over the past few decades, energy and water fluxes have been directly measured by a global flux network, which was established by regional and continental network sites based on an eddy covariance (EC) method. Although, the EC method possesses many advantages, its typical data coverage could not exceed 65 % due to various environmental factors including micrometeorological conditions and systematic malfunctions. In this study, four different methodologies were used to fill the gap in latent heat flux (LE) data.

Biodiversity has been recognized as one of the key components of environmental sustainability. Assessment of biodiversity trends and progress toward targets requires effective and sound indicators. In our article, we review and compare the leading multispecies biodiversity indices used in global and regional assessments. We reviewed basic characteristics of these aggregated and composite biodiversity indicators and evaluated them with regard to their ecological performance, policy relevance and other accounting aspects.

In order to choose adequate conservation strategies to face the deterioration of natural ecosystems and the decline of species, it is essential to know the spatial distribution of diversity. Here, we use predictive modelling in spiders, which is a group of highly diverse generalist predators that show a great potential as diversity indicators. We built a predictive model of spider species richness within a protected area assessing those environmental factors that have the strongest effect in the distribution of spider species richness.

Widespread land use changes, and ensuing effects on ecosystem services, are expected from expanding bioenergy production. Although most U.S. production of ethanol is from corn, it is envisaged that future ethanol production will also draw from cellulosic sources such as perennial grasses.

Understanding the intimate dynamics of urban–wildland interfaces in Mediterranean landscapes is particularly challenging because of multiple biophysical factors (dry or arid climate, low-quality soils, poor vegetation cover) determining an increased environmental sensitivity to human pressure. Although dense and compact cities were sprawling rapidly in the most recent decades, many suburban areas in southern Europe still preserve biodiversity-rich habitats, traditional crop mosaics and high-quality relict forest stands.

Land cover classifications of coarse-resolution data can aid the identification and quantification of natural variability and anthropogenic change at regional scales, but true landscape change can be distorted by misrepresentation of map classes. The Lerma–Chapala–Santiago (LCS) is biophysically diverse and heavily modified by urbanization and agricultural expansion.

The Sanaga River is one of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest and greatly regulated rivers. Available flow data for this hydrosystem largely cover the pre- and post-regulation periods. From comparisons between unregulated (hypothetical) and observed scenarios, it has been possible to separate and to quantify hydro-climatic (groundwater + rainfall) change effects from anthropogenic impacts (especially dam-related alterations).

In past decades, the Iberian Peninsula has been shown to have suffered vegetation changes such as desertification and reforestation. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST) parameters, estimated from data acquired by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite series, are particularly adapted to assess these changes.